A custody log that can prove its gaps can prove it has none

Discovery productions land in one folder on the review container, sometimes forty thousand files in an afternoon. The chain-of-custody index has to record every arrival, in order, with size, and never skip one quietly.

A watcher on the intake path, kinds created and renamed, ignore_dirs .tmp. Every event carries an id, path, timestamp, is_dir and new_size_bytes. The indexer consumes the SSE stream and writes a row per event into the matter's SQLite file.

The indexer's host reboots during lunch. It comes back with the last id it wrote, 4812, and reconnects with since_id=4812; the watcher replays 4813 onward from retained history before going live. If the gap is older than the history keeps, the answer is HISTORY_GAP, not silence, and the indexer rescans instead of pretending.

The watcher's stats expose events_dropped. A zero there is a claim the index can make in an affidavit.